2010 Archives

One of my bosses told me about a nonprofit association she’s working with, and she mentioned that they have an interesting challenge: they’re becoming irrelevant. An old organization, they find themselves struggling to attract members and donors or explain the value of their mission. ...

At Notre Dame, we charge our clients for the work we do. Many schools are tinkering with their internal business models and testing the options.
We’re partly funded by the University, so we’re required to recover part of our budget through chargebacks (also known as cost recovery). I...

I take vacations to get away from work. To spend more time with my family, enjoy the lake, or play camp counselor for a week in my favorite Michigan summer camp. But I have always struggled with the idea of going completely offline, because I know I’ll return to a stuffed inbox and tons of ...

At the end of his recent blog post about catch phrases by my talented colleague and insightful higher ed copywriter, Mike Roe, he poses a question (emphasis mine):
Do you have a tagline? If not, how might people sum up your department, group, association, or college in just a few words?
Do you r...

After a major campus crisis, schools often respond by scrambling to put together a crisis plan. Often this stops with a “business continuity plan,” or how they’ll keep things going despite a crisis. At Notre Dame, my colleague Julie Flory helped establish a Crisis Communications...

I’ve spent some time thinking about where we need to go next with mobile. Our websites are mobile-friendly (it’s just part of our process) and we have a pretty good mobile website at m.nd.edu. But we’re not done. We don’t have an app. There’s more to develop. And the...

Notre Dame has recently begun to tackle the problem of our many content silos, with digital assets being captured, stored, processed, and delivered in so many ways. Last year, our interviews with faculty and staff revealed a troubling conclusion: It’s often faster and easier to re-create c...

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the HighEdWeb 2010 conference in Cincinnati. This was a wonderful conference and I highly recommend it to anyone in our industry. Because I went on Notre Dame’s dime, I had to present something from my trip there. I gathered together a few reflectio...

In 2009 I wrote about cognitive load and asked the question, “If users have a working memory limit of approximately seven items, how can you justify twelve global navigation options?”
I’ve been meaning to revisit this, almost since I wrote it. Because I was wrong.
I’ve re...

Yesterday, our team debated the right UX approach to a search field. Should the button say “Search?” Or is it ok to say “Go?” Text in the field or not? A separate label or no?
I searched online for definitive study results, but got nothing substantial. What I found, howeve...

Josh Stowe posted a series of tweets today about the Notre Dame Alumni Association implementing a central editing and approval process for all of their website content:
Excited about switching to a centralized content approval process. Anyone can draft, my team approves/publishes, and thereR...

Ever since we launched blogs.nd.edu, we’ve had a slew of new signups. Many of these are new bloggers, and they’re eager to get going. But they don’t always know the tips and tricks that can help a new blog gain traction amongst the millions of other blogs in the world.
Here are ...

Years ago, when I was running my own little web business, one of my clients was a car insurance company. We designed their website, but had inherited an online quoting system written in approximately 100,000 lines of terrible Perl code.
Every few months, my client would send me updates that requ...

Leading up to my two-part Usability Testing 360 webinar series, I bring you a handful of resources, articles, tools, and tips on Usability Testing.
Learn some of the terms, definitions, buzzwords, and otherwise confusing jargon related to usability with this handy usability glossary.
CollegeWebEd...

I recently wrote about DIY U and students creating their own majors.
A great comment on Andrew Careaga’s recent review of DIY U suggests this isn’t as easy as it sounds:
However (there’s always a however), I have a couple of concerns with the premise that students right out of ...

Every year universities and colleges embark on a quest for an elusive beast: the content management system. Many of these organizations have a dream: a single system for the entire university to store, manage, and distribute content. They call it enterprise content management (also known as eCM)....

I’m loving the high-profile attention to the changes we’re experiencing in higher education, and the tremendous shifts coming our way. From DIY U to Frontline’s College Inc. to Seth Godin’s recent post, people are taking note.
But I’m also frustrated by a disconcert...

“In an ideal world, of course, your personal life would be impermeably separated from your professional existence.”
After reading a thought-provoking article by Nikki Massaro Kauffman on privacy and digital tattoos I realized something:
I don’t want my work and my personal life ...

I am both excited and terrified for higher education.
For many industries, it’s no longer enough to design your offerings to the customer’s demands. Customers don’t just want input – they want control. This means more customizable products, more responsive services, and m...

In February, Notre Dame’s Alumni Association did something remarkable: it launched an interactive television program entirely online.
The program is called Tender, Strong, and True: Living the Gospel Daily. It’s a panel-format show discussing a topic of faith with academics and spiri...

ND is rolling out Blogs at Notre Dame, a blogging platform using WordPress MU. We’re hoping to get some of our brilliant and interesting faculty members blogging. This raises a lot of questions:
There’s been a lot of talk about blogging for admissions and student recruitment, but sho...

The web profession is a client-driven one, even when we don’t technically have clients. We’re always teaching, educating the various stakeholders as to best practices, how to use new technologies, and why they shouldn’t waste their time on the flashy buzzword-du-jour.
If youR...

Like many higher ed web professionals, my team is caught in the middle.
On one hand, we have clients and want to help them get their projects done, make them happy, and accomplish their goals.
On the other, we have the institution. Even if we’re entirely client-driven and can run like a bus...

Note: I know very well that the word is spelled résumé but for whatever reason my blog won’t display the é character unless I explicitly state it with an HTML entity code . Argh.
I’ve been doing a lot of hiring lately. This time around, I took careful note of the ...

A recent question on our internal campus communicators network prompted a question about Google’s social networking entrant, Buzz. There’s been plenty of chatter about it, so I don’t feel the need to summarize what Buzz is.
As @donschindler pointed out, Jeremiah Owyang has a gre...

If you haven’t checked out the Horizon Report in the past, it’s an annual publication that highlights key technologies expected to affect higher education in the next five years. This year’s report was published on January 14 and has some real gems, as usual.
What’s On the...

Take this brief quiz and make a mental note of your responses:
Have you and your boss (or client) agreed on the important metrics for your website’s success?
That’s it. If the answer is yes, you’re on the road to being an analytics superhero. But if you don’t know the a...